Marketo, as easy or complicated as you need it to be.

What do you like best?

It's simple, yet complex. When it comes to "what can I do" the sky really is the limit. You can do just about anything you want. Whether or not you should is a whole other story, but Marketo will not be the reason you cannot do it!

What do you dislike?

User interface is glitch, and laggy. The "tree" format is ridiculous. I would much rather a tile format with campaigns and better over all "clunking" of projects. However the Pros out weigh this small con. After I got used to it I didn't really notice. Every not and then i'll get frustrated.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Don't think about "static" issues. Nobody wants to change platforms (it's not easy) but that's also just a static problem! After you make the switch ask yourself. Okay, NOW what can i do that I couldn't before. Cloning entire campaigns, leads that can flow through triggers more then once, seamless integration with salesforce and the amount of time you could be saving with the program and allocate that time to other projects.

What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo takes our marketing automation to the next level. It allows us to spend time and build complex campaigns and clone the ENTIRE campaign to utilize elsewhere. This not only saves us time, but we know it's done right the first time, and every time after that!

The integration between Salesforce and Marketo is seamless. The communication and "real-time" sharing of data really gives our sales team the edge we need to make a lasting impression on our potential members!

Marketo Marketing Automation -- The tool for the future of marketing

What do you like best?

Marketo does two things right for marketers. First, on the design-side the drag-and-drop elements make it easy to build templates and adjust emails/landing pages without breaking the whole layout. Second, the logical flow of the automation steps take the guesswork out of wondering what will happen when you turn the system on.

The growing demands on marketing to do more in terms of volume and do more in terms of personalization and relevance require highly functional tools that we can rely on. Marketo delivers in spades.

What do you dislike?

Now, I can't claim that Marketo is perfect. But I don't want the shortcomings to overshadow the value it provides.

The reporting module of Marketo allows you to slice and dice your data in many different ways - giving you insight as high-level or detailed as you want. But the interface to do it is not intuitive, I definitely recommend using the training resources and community to help dig deeper into this area.

Because the logic for automation is straightforward, you give up the ability to branch programs and take members down different paths based on behavior criteria as members move through a Flow. This can be mitigated with optional criteria on Flow steps and creating groups of programs that allow you to move members across programs as they take different actions. If you go down the path of the latter, you'll want to keep a mapping of programs to ensure you can track dependencies later.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Understanding the internal resources you have to dedicate to the administration of the back-end of any marketing automation platform is critical. If you're purchasing a system primarily for front-end, marketing users then Marketo is a solid choice. It's easy to build lists and programs without needing to learn all the ins and outs of the system.

What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized?

One of our primary business challenges is understanding what our prospects and leads are truly interested in after their initial outreach to us. We want to ensure that we are providing relevant communications and offers so that we can build a positive relationship with each person.

Using Marketo has allowed us to get very sophisticated with our targeting and build multiple nurture tracks that speak to specific interests -- and provide the ability for people to change their interests without being stuck in irrelevant nurture programs.

With these programs in place, we have increased our ability to prepare people for a sales conversation (i.e. keeping their interest from an initial download to an MQL status). Our Sales team is making their first contact with leads that recognize our name and products.

Like visual coding for marketers

What do you like best?

One of the best things about Marketo is the seemingly unlimited ways in which you can use the software. It seems as though there is not right or wrong way to set up a marketing program, manage a database, create a list, etc. It reminds me of a visual coding platform - once you learn the syntax and the basics of how each command or feature works, you can configure and set up programs within Marketo however you want (not unlike MIT's Scratch platform that teaches children how to code - https://scratch.mit.edu/).

What do you dislike?

One of the most frustrating things about Marketo is the lack of support with finding best practice examples of more complex campaigns, database management, and marketing analytics. Because there is not one correct way of executing a program in Marketo, it sometimes makes me uneasy that I am doing something that is not considered best practice, and I do not know when down the road I will pay the price for it. Though the tutorials on the Community site are comprehensive on a topics level, each tutorial does not dig deep enough to my liking. Additionally, the community, though active and one of the most helpful ones I've encountered, there is a lack of knowledge about topics I want to know most about (more sophisticated ways of using Marketo, or any marketing software for analytics or advanced campaign set-up). However, like coding, there is always a way to go around the infrastructure of the platform and create a hack, but I'm just waiting for the day all of my hacks come back to...

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be prepared to learn and change the way you think of running marketing programs. Marketo tries to operationalize or at least give you the option to operationalize certain marketing features - be ready and enjoy that change!

What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized?

Using Marketo, we've been able to fill the need for a centralized marketing campaign management system, as well as manage a rudimentary version of BI (using Marketo's RCE Analyzer). The biggest benefit has been RCE - it not only changed the way we report, but it changed our mindset about what metrics we should be looking at to measure marketing ROI. It has changed the way our marketing leaders view the department, as well as strengthened the relationship between Sales Operations, as RCE can transform data in a different way than Salesforce.com or Excel. This was, however, with the help of an outside consulting firm (because of the lack of best practices).

The Robust Marketing Automation Platform

What do you like best?

- The awesome Marketo community. With a such a powerful tool, it's great to have a huge area where I can go to look up how others are using features or running their campaign flows. Also, Marketo provides some great content internally, providing a nice combo of resources. After using the Marketo community, your going to expect other tools to have the same thing (and they usually do not).

- Love that you can build simple flows in the beginning, but as you get more advanced, you find better or more efficient ways to process data and run campaigns.

- The Marketo UI is straightforward, and after the on-boarding, you really appreciate the setup and each section works with each other.

- Powerful. You can do ALOT beyond outbound marketing like email. We use Marketo for all of our inbound marketing as well.

- Salesforce Integration is great, no issues.

What do you dislike?

- Landing Page builder is really outdated. We were forced to use an outside solution for our landing pages because coding all our landing pages got a little out of hand, even though we had templates. (Forms 2.0 was amazing and allows us to use our forms anywhere)

- Slow loading times, even on some basic smart lists takes up to a few minutes. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's a bit frustrating.

- Reporting. We tend to do all of our reporting in SFDC.

What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo is our hub . All marketing activities run through Marketo then into SFDC. Lost without it.

Marketo makes me not care what else is out there

What do you like best?

I like the advanced logic that allows me to customize and automate campaigns based on very specific actions. This lets me develop personalized nurture campaigns, as well as keep an eye on a lead's movements through the marketing funnel (an invaluable tool!)

What's better is this information can be easily shared with sales teams from directly within the CRM. While we still have a ways to go on fully taking advantage of this functionality, I've received a lot of feedback about how useful it's been to view a lead's actions on the website, via email, etc.

Most recently, I love the Marketing Calendar, which gives me the ability to keep most of my data in one place.

What do you dislike?

I think the pricing tiers could use some improvement because there's quite a large jump in the middle. I understand the need for tiers so I don't necessarily think the pricing itself is steep. I just think the gap between some pricing segments is huge, which makes the investment more difficult to justify when your business is growing. When you absolutely need Marketo (and you do!), it's important to sell its value to people who may not use the software and don't understand its benefits for the price.

Recommendations to others considering the product

The learning curve is a bit steep. Don't expect to sign up and be up-and-running within a couple weeks. This is A-OK because it helps you evaluate your marketing activities and truly think in terms of revenue, which ultimately makes your marketing better. It just makes it a bit of a hard sell to higher-ups who may think it's plug-and-play.

What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized?

Our sales team is entirely outside and they're swamped with trying to maintain relationships with prospects. So in addition to alleviating some of their sales activities, we're also going out into the market to generate new contacts. The fact we can quickly spin up a landing page with tracking lets us develop ad campaigns that convert - AND we're able to better track their lead sources - because we're not waiting for phone calls.

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